Nutrition Facts for the less Educated – and the Scriptures
The Lord has been kind in seeding our planet with much grass
and this is the direct or indirect source of food for many animals and humans
that live on the planet. Sugar, Wheat, Rice, Corn etc. all come from grass.
Because of its abundance wheat is also one of the cheapest sources of food.
Therefore the diet of poor rural persons around my area primarily consists of unleavened bread.
When such persons come into the city they make good money nowadays, but human
habits persist and they tend to continue with the same sort of diet they ate in
their villages. This is where I have to intervene and explain to such persons the importance of proper nutrition along with some nutrition facts.
If one were to try and teach an illiterate person about
carbohydrates, proteins, minerals and so on it would go over their head. A
simpler explanation has been developed by me. I tell them that although bread
will appease hunger and give them the capacity to work it will not help any
more. They need an egg a day and some milk, about a quarter of liter of it
daily to make their flesh and bones. Further, vegetables are required to make
blood the best being leafy green ones such as spinach and goosefoot that is
plentiful in India.
In addition, to get the strength to digest all this properly something raw like
onions, carrots or a bit of fruit is required (for the live enzymes). This
simple explanation, albeit highly approximate, works quite well and those who follow this simple prescription
(such as the village lad Hari described in a couple earlier posts) put on some
weight and develop a healthy rosy color in a matter of weeks as any laboring
person who has a nutritious diet would tend to.
My simple explanations although inaccurate serves the
purpose and this makes me realize that mystics of lore must have been doing
something similar when they described the spiritual side of the universe to
mankind. Thus when a scripture describes that early on in creation the darkness
was separated from light some modern humans tend to laugh at this. However, the
fact is that most advanced modern explanations for creation include the
separation of photons (light) from antiphotons (darkness) as a primary step in
creation. Thus when it is said that Eve was created from a bit of the rib of
Adam that too makes eminent genetic sense. It would have been just as useless
to tell the early human or even many modern ones that the male contains both
the X and Y chromosome and it is the Y bit from this that creates the female,
as it would be to tell Hari that trace elements such as iodine are required for
a certain hormone in his body. Yet when Hari accepts my simple explanation with
faith he benefits.
Image adapted from
Image adapted from
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